Yvette Cooper’s tactic, in the face of smouldering civil unrest about asylum hotels, was to wobble her head and adopt a damp, disapproving tone. Public-emergency edict delivered by Play School presenter.
Boggle-eyed behind a pair of blue-framed spectacles, the Home Secretary mewed that her approach would be ‘orderly’. Not just ‘orderly’ but also ‘controlled’ and ‘managed’. She gave us a prim lecture about the meaning of our flags, invoked HM the King and the national anthem. We were informed, vicariously, that it was ‘the British way’ to ‘do our bit’ in helping migrants.
Uh-oh. Doing one’s bit is seldom much fun. It tends to be a euphemism for ‘mop it up, suckers’. Doing one’s bit comes from the same rhetorical stable as ‘we’re going to ask those with the broadest shoulders to pay a little more tax’. Disagree and you will made to look a cur.
The Home Secretary, who had almost as dreadful an August as Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves, was speaking on the first day back at Westminster.
During the Commons’ summer recess, the Government’s asylum-handling policy went up in flames, as did several Union Jacks and flags of St George – though not yet, mercifully, any migrant hotels. The Essex market town of Epping, whose Bell Hotel became a trouble spot, started to resemble Agincourt. A glamorous old bird I know who lives there no longer steps outside her house in the evening for fear of being shouted at by skinheads.
Until recently, the most you had to worry about in Epping was being hey-nonny-no’d and bladder-whacked by morris dancers.
Ms Cooper coughed up ‘proper, controlled, managed, orderly manner’, or permutations of that phrase, some 20 times in her Commons statement. She was on her feet for well over two hours. The Prime Minister used near-identical language in a BBC radio interview.
‘Orderly manner, orderly manner, orderly manner.’ This was an expression born of panic rather than genuine expectation.
You only call for order when you have lost it.
Towards the end of Ms Cooper’s opening remarks her tone, already as wet as drizzle, went even more babyish as she essayed a stirring passage about patriotism.
‘When we sing God Save The King we do so with pride for the values of our flags, our king and country: togetherness, fairness and decency, respect for each other, respect for the rule of law.’
It has to be admitted that the late Larry Olivier had a surer touch with these things. Casting directors will not necessarily be beating a path to the Balls/Cooper front door begging Yvette to play Henry V.
A large crowd of Labour backbenchers sat behind the Home Secretary. A few cheered, particularly when she gaily took easy kicks at her Conservative shadow, Chris Philp. So much for that ‘respect for each other’!
Mr Philp knows his stuff. He is energetic. He has firm views that might not have found instant disfavour with Attila the Hun. But his manner at the despatch box is blinky and blurty.
When he sat down after his assault on the Government’s immigration failures he gulped a half pint of water in practically one go. There was the sizzle of a farrier’s horseshoe being quenched. Steam shot from his eyeballs.
That backbench support for Ms Cooper was limited. Plenty of her troops looked peaky, anxious, thoughtful. They were in their constituencies over the summer to hear what voters were saying. It can’t have been easy for them.
One of Ms Cooper’s ministerial colleagues, Dame Diana Johnson, frowned throughout, a poor soul weighed by woes, perhaps wishing that in the last parliament she had not been quite so dismissive of the Tories’ Rwanda plan.
At least that would have been a deterrent. At least it would have been worth a try. And yet Labour worked ceaselessly to wreck the Sunak government’s immigration policies.
Now Ms Cooper was demanding that the Tories and Reform had a moral duty to support, er, panic measures. Vintage shamelessness.
